We get nostalgic for Victorian Christmases. What did Victorians get nostalgic for?
I quote from the column:
Cecil is quite wrong. A nostalgia for a past age runs through Western literature like a thread, right from the times of the Greeks and Romans. Call it the Golden Age, the good old days, whatever, a yearning for a past time when things were better has been with us from The Iliad onwards.
Are you saying we once yearned for the enlightened Christmas that the Greeks and Romans celebrated?
That’s not what Cecil said. Read the quote. “Longing for the past dates from the early 19th century.” In fact such longing seems to be a constant human trait. Nostalgia for past Christmases is just one more facet of it.
This seems true only by construing nostalgia in extremely broad terms. For example, Christians arguably yearn for the innocence of Eden before the fall, but it seems odd to describe that as nostalgia. Likewise, Aquinas recognized that he had been preceded by a giant, namely Aristotle, but calling that nostalgia also seems a stretch - we think of nostalgia as fundamentally sentimental. That said, Cecil recognized when writing this that he was going out on a limb, and is happy to revisit if you can provide cites.
Well hell Ed, I think you might be reaching a tad far into the past, there. How about Jesus’s birthdate?
I’d think that would be about as far as a Christian would care to go.
How about Petrarch? He referred to his culture as a “dark age” in the 1330s and yearned for a return to classical traditions, which he viewed as higher and more perfect than his own time. He then tried to write in the literary style of the ancients, used mythological references, and helped start the Renaissance, a period marked by intense nostalgia for Classical culture.
Don’t be silly. The story of Genesis is part of the Christian bible. The fact that Jesus didn’t arrive till later doesn’t mean Christians can’t yearn for Eden, although I’m not buying that this qualifies as nostalgia.
Well, now you start to home in on the thing. I’ll have to check with the Master, but I’m guessing he’d be willing to accept isolated instances of nostalgia in pre-industrial times among the educated. The illiterate masses, however, knew nothing of classical traditions. As for the Renaissance, certainly there was increased appreciation of the past, but this was coupled with a sense of progress. Cecil refers to this briefly at the end of this column:
Again, not saying you couldn’t find instances of it, but I’m not seeing that nostalgia was much of a factor in the Renaissance - certainly not to the extent it seeps through much Victorian literature.
This is an interesting question, one about which I have nothing factual to say whatsoever.
What’s the difference between nostalgia and the other cases of “longing for the past” that have been brought up in this thread? Ed notes that nostalgia involves an element of sentimentality. But what is sentimentality? I guess when we say someone is acting on sentiment, or that something has sentimental value, we mean that something has been evaluated not based just on a calculation of its benefits, but rather (or, if pleasant feeling is a benefit to be calculated, then “also”) based on the feelings evoked in the evaluator.
If that’s right, then by saying nostalgia is a sentimental longing for the past, we’re saying that it is a desire that things now become more like they were in the past, not because (or just because) that will be more effective or (sentiment-independently) beneficial, but rather, because the past is better liked regardless of the efficiency of its ways or the benefits it brings or fails to bring.
But does anyone actually think like this? Usually, people making nostalgic pronouncements about the past try to justify the pronouncements, by explaining the ways things were better in the past. People had more character, more common sense, understood things more deeply, or whatever. These are benefits that are supposed to come from the way things were in the past, and are supposed to give us reasons to think it would be nice if the past came back in some sense.
The distinction between nostalgia and other longings for the past, then, must lie not in the type of justification given for these longings, but rather, in the motivation–however unarticulated–lying behind these longings. The nostalgic kind is the motivation that doesn’t care about benefit but only about pleasant the feelings associated with reminiscence.
So the question is, when did people begin to long for the past simply because of pleasant feelings they had when thinking about the past?
Since the difference between nostalgia and other longings is one of motivation and not of articulate justification, it will be hard to answer the question just by looking at historical texts. I imagine it will difficult to find any text that expresses a longing for hte past, nostalgic or otherwise, that doesn’t give reasons why the past is more beneficial in some way than the present.
But there probably are such texts–I would imagine more such references exist in more recent texts–so who knows? Maybe some people here know of such.
Absent textual references which say more or less explicitly “Gosh, I long for the past just because I like it better, damn the consequences,” how else could we figure out when nostalgia came into existence?
One relevant question here is where Cecil got the idea that nostalgia began in Victorian times. What leads him to think there wasn’t nostalgia before that? Why does he think that prior to Victorian times, if people longed for the past, it was just because they thought the ways of their past were more beneficial in some calculable way than the ways of their present?
-FrL-
If I had to guess, I’d guess that nostalgia generally–maybe always–is coupled with a sense of progress. Nostalgia, it seems to me, involves a devaluing of progress, or at least, an insistence on an alternative vision of progress.
-FrL-
You’ll appreciate that it’s not always easy for an acolyte such as myself to grasp Cecil’s thought processes, but I think his idea here was that industrialization gave rise to a literate middle class, the primary reservoir for nostalgia.
As to the question of this thread, show an example of longing for the past that comes before the 19th century, and which is not private to the longer. It’s not “Things were better back then.” It’s “It was all so beautiful and alive back then.”
As to the original question, of course, the answer that Cecil should have given is: “For God’s sake, get a copy of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol and actually read it, moron!”
And how much Victorian literature did the illiterate masses of the 19th century read? I know, I know, I’m just yanking your chain here - the important word there is “masses,” not “illiterate.” But Cecil’s claim is too sweeping, I think, to allow that distinction. Humanism was not a tiny, esoteric, ivory tower movement as you imply.
Really? Maybe in the late Renaissance, but not in its earlier stages. Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux isn’t an act of discovery; he climbs that mountain and marvels at the view because it is the same view that his classical heroes looked down upon hundreds of years prior.
And even the late Renaissance’s sense of progress is a result of the success of the humanists in recreating the classical culture they pined for.
Okay, I can live with that. The important thing is that Cecil makes an error that’s too common in the history of ideas: ideas don’t have starting points, they aren’t born at a discrete moment in time. They are shaped by those before them and form over long, long periods of time.
You missed the boat. This quetiona and answer was only about Christmas nostalgia, not notalgia in general.
We have a completely different take on this, then. The work you speak of doesn’t strike me as nostalgic at all; rather he is delighting in rediscovery. Nostalgia seems to me to be essentially backward looking; I don’t see that here.
Your argument seems to be that appreciation of the past = nostalgia. I don’t buy this. If you’ll allow me to drag in some non-SD-related experience, I bought an old house and renovated it. I don’t see this as an exercise in nostalgia. I had no sense that the past was better and I was recreating it.
Who would argue? Cecil’s point, and my point now that I’ve had a chance to think about it, is that nostalgia entails a sense of loss. You see numerous examples of this in 19th century literature, not just that having to do with Christmas. It was much less prevalent earlier, setting aside yearning for the innocence of Eden and that kind of thing.
Okay. The original line being criticized, though, was this:
I guess what I disagree with is the precision in saying that nostalgia “dates from” the early 19th century. That’s not true, as we seem to agree - plenty of folks felt nostalgic before the English industrial revolution.
Romantic literature and elements of Victorian culture were dripping with nostalgia, yeah, and that was fairly unusual. I’d hesitate to say unprecedented - the courtly culture of France in the late middle ages was pretty nostalgic, too, but that’s neither here nor there. Whether it was peculiarly common in the 19th century or not, Cecil said nostalgia started then, which is just not an accurate portrayal of things. As we agree, that’s not how ideas work.
Not to prolong this indefinitely, but we seem to have different ideas on what constitutes nostalgia. I’m not seeing many instances of it prior to the 19th century. The Petrarch piece you referred to didn’t strike me as nostalgic. I’m only vaguely familiar with French courtly literature; can you provide some cites supporting your view? If so, I’m sure I can get Cecil to amend his column.
Dryden in the late 17th century, from his translation of Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
This yearning for the simpler and more virtuous age of our ancestors is reflected throughout classical literature and onwards into the modern age. The Romans of the Imperial era waxed nostalgic for the good old days of Republican Rome, Englishmen of the 17th and 18th century looked back to Merrie Olde England and lamented the passing of old English virtues.
Nostalgia is a human constant.
Sure. Jean Froissart’s Chronicles from the 14th century read like romanticized history. He consistently complains about the loss of chivalry and nobility, and it sounds (to my ear) very nostalgic.
“Historical Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Burgundy” by Ruth Morse (Modern Language Review, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Jan., 1980), pp. 48-64, Historical Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Burgundy on JSTOR) is a pretty good summary of romantic histories in medieval Europe. Morse has this to say about Froissart:
Back on Petrarch, I found a substantial number of historians who agree in the characterization of his writing as “nostalgic.” The best example by far is Petrarch’s letter to Cola di Rienzo. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble finding any place it has been published online, but the gist of it is that Petrarch is commenting on the feelings he gets walking through the ruins of Rome and the feeling of loss he has, wishing the culture of his day were as glorious as the old empire. An excerpt:
Giuseppe Mazzotta is one of those historians who agrees that Petrarch was nostalgic, and in The Worlds of Petrarch he writes (bolding mine):
And while searching I found two other bits. William Bouwsma, one of the more prominent current medievalists, identifies popular nostalgia in Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture:
In addition, other cultures surely had nostalgia. Most of my knowledge is medieval, but this appeared in my searching, and the title enough seems relevant. The Book of Strangers: Medieval Arabic Graffiti on the Theme of Nostalgia
I have conveyed your thoughts to the Master, who concedes he may have cast his net too wide. He’ll rewrite his answer in narrower terms, which breaks his heart. But the facts must be served.